Two new articles in the Encyclopaedia Galactica section:
- Bouncing Being, stalwart member of the Star Guard.
- Science Moon-E, a not-very-important scientific outpost.
Updates
Updates
No new pages this time, but updates to a couple of existing pages:
- The Star Guard membership membership roll call has been expanded to include more current members. A few historical details have been corrected or tidied up.
- The list of Galactic Threats has been expanded with new entries.
Encyclopaedia Galactica
It's been almost a year since my Game switched its focus to the galaxy beyond our planet. A year of really hard work.
As I explained some time ago, when I began the Game in 1987 I initially wanted a science fiction setting, but soon realised that setting it on Earth in, well, 1987, made my job so much easier:
This gave me a huge advantage over running a pure science-fiction game. I didn't need to invent all the little trivial details such as how people cooked their dinner in this world, and the players didn't need to ask me. And of course that's exactly why I decided to time travel back to 1987 instead of setting the whole thing in the future.
Well, now we're in outer space, adventuring around a galactic empire spanning multiple worlds, species, and technologies.
Half the hard work comes in preparation. I need to create a constant stream of new planets to visit. Not quite one a week, but not far off. No planet needs to be as detailed as Earth is. I don't need complete maps and detailed histories, because the players will only interact with a small part of it before moving on. I need about as much detail as, say, a Star Trek planet has. Physical characteristics, population, technology, politics, a history outline, key personalities ... actually, it's a lot of detail, some of which I need to share with my players, some of which I can, or even must, keep to myself.
The rest of the hard work comes in the Game itself, where I have to constantly answer questions about the environment on the fly, and naturally I haven't thought through every minute detail. It's just not possible.
There are short cuts, of course. I can always fall back on my standard approach of stealing stuff, then making sure the players can figure out where I've stolen it from and can fill in the details themselves. If I rip off Forbidden Planet, for example (and yes, I have), then I don't need to explain too much about monsters from the id because the players all know what they are.
But it's still pretty much a full-time job, that I'm barely keeping on top of.
Now excuse me, I have to go and plot an interplanetary war (two very different planets, politics, spaceships, weapon technology, orbital mechanics, and I'm sure I've forgotten something ...).
I've put a small part of my documentation on the web site, organised into the Encyclopaedia Galactica. I'll try to continue to expand it over the next few weeks. But, honestly, typing up my notes and making them pretty isn't my top priority at the moment.
Dave
The whole Game web site is dedicated to David Allan, for reasons I have previously given.
I just want to add that this month, 37 years after the Game began, I am re-using a plot idea Dave gave me on day one. I'm running a story line I literally called "Ten Electrons". 37 years later, Dave is still in the Game.
And I still have the best players in the world.
Measuring Space
How fast does a starship have to move? This is a question that took me a long time to answer. Because the answer dictates the whole feel of the world I'm trying to portray. Is travel between worlds slow and leisurely, like ocean liners, or fast like air travel? Whichever I choose, I'm either allowing or disallowing a whole set of story types.
Slow travel makes it impossible to react to an immediate crisis on other worlds. You can't save people from a natural disaster or stop a crime in progress if you're getting there a month after the news reaches you.
Fast travel doesn't give you leisure time to do anything _except_ react to immediate problems. You can't practice with your lightsaber if the jump to Alderaan only takes 10 minutes.
When thinking about speed, I started with a map and a history of the Emissariate of Bolusca and worked backwards. And to draw a map, I had a few pre-established facts from earlier stories that I had to accommodate. My chain of reasoning went as follows:
- The Emissariate could only occupy a small part of the galaxy because I had other aliens defined as coming from the far side of the galaxy.
- The black hole Cygnus X-1 is a real-world object about 2.2 kiloparsecs from Earth, and I had a plot arising from the original Strikeforce story that I wanted to use. This means it had to fall within Emissariate space.
- But I didn't want it deep in Emissariate space; somewhere near one border would be better.
- Let's put Bolusca about 2.3 kiloparsecs from Earth, then, and have its borders extend roughly 2.3 kiloparsecs in all directions, putting Cygnus X-1 somewhere out near, but not right at, the Krai border.
Now I had a key distance: 2.3 kiloparsecs. And because I had a history outline with "fixed points" that had to happen to coincide with known events on Earth, I knew that a fast ship had to go from Bolusca to Earth in approximately 40 days. So that sets a speed for the fastest ships of 2.3 kiloparsecs in 40 days, or almost 60 parsecs per day. Let's say it's 60 parsecs, because it's a round number, and because it allows a margin of the journey for course correction, engine maintenance, and other such things I can imagine a long journey needing. It's a little over 71,000 times the speed of light.
Journeying for 40 days in a cramped ship is a lot. Columbus only took 33 days to reach the Americas. But Bolusca to Earth is an exceptional journey. Most journeys between worlds in the Emissariate would be a lot shorter. But how short?
The average separation between stars in the milky way is about 1.5 parsecs. We know that a lot of stars have planets, but not all of the are suitable for life colonization, so let's say there's an average separation between inhabited worlds of six parsecs, a fairly arbitrary number but it will do. So the travel time for a fast ship between two planets could be as short as two and a half hours. Is that workable?
Yes, it actually is. It means you can really respond to emergencies on the next world over, but long journeys take days and weeks. It gives me a world that feels like the 1920s or 30s in terms of travel: easy to get between cities by car, train, or airplane; days or weeks to cross oceans by ship. And as I'm quite happy with reflecting the pulp era of science fiction, that works for me.
I can look at the extremes of the distance scale, too: the other side of the galactic core is around 16 kiloparsecs, which is around 270 days. So you could do it, but it's a really significant effort. The andromeda galaxy is 778 kiloparsecs, or around 35 years, and you'd have to be insane to try it. Within a single solar system, you can jump between planets almost instantaneously. I'm happy with those outcomes for plot reasons.
So now I have a pretty solid time and distance scale. Next I need to flesh out my map, placing key systems and making sure they are in the right places to allow the travel time I've already arbitrarily picked to make certain plots work. This is where it could all go horribly wrong...
What Does The Game Look Like?
I was recently asked what the Game looks like when we play it. It's a tough question to answer because it doesn't really look like a game. It looks like seven middle-aged men sitting around a table, talking, and making occasional notes. It looks like a board meeting:
Because 90% of the Game takes place in our heads. We use some visual aids--my terribly drawn maps, or sometimes a plan with counters or models on it (that's what you see in the centre of the image above: my visual representation of the situation the players are in as they figure out how to board an enemy vessel without being overcome by a swarm of killer robots)--but they aren't the Game. The Game is pure imagination.
The Game looks like the week I spend thinking up a new storyline:
The Game looks like the hour I spend after each session updating my records:
The Game looks like the thousands of pages of documentation I've written (small section of it shown here):
The Game looks like the shelf-full of reference books I read to give it the illusion of believability:
The Game looks like the random notes I write in my plot book in the middle of the night, for reasons which escape me but which might get used for something one day:
But what the Game really looks like is entirely in the heads of the six players, because what they think it looks like is more important than all of the above. It looks like their ideas, and plans, and character interactions, and annoying, confounding, frustrating interactions with my plots. That's what the Game looks like to me. I have no idea what it looks like to them...
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